Literary LEO 2013

Poetry — First

For Cheap Lunch or Headstones

BY KEN L. WALKER

Heading back down south, I confront a limestone wall while eatinga glazed donut and walking through the St. Michael Cemetery —the Rues, the Brüder Heinzmann, der Schwestern Klosterman,the aunts of my aunts. Not sure it matters you respond at all. Just don’twalk between anything. Between, a walk alone. Alone,the only thing that matters. Not sure that it matters I respond at all.A response is fecal. These fecal things we’ve gotten ourselves intodecompose in the same amount of time as a small pond of city watervanishes into fingerprint-proof. The amount of Paris in Voltaire’s a lie.For him, watching a man die. Rhetoric, neutrality’s gown. I couldconvince, youth still matters. Matter sticksto the tunnel that connects each finger slid slowlyinto the river’s surface. A banister appears to be playing the harp.A harp splits the eye if betrayed, used to tune and refinish hers,and now look at her scar — Phillipus. I don’t know whatI’m doing here — a five-point underground grid, mitre saw,miniature clamp, a cherry chair split in half on three legs. The living roomis looking at our scars. Don’t sit there. I don’t know what. Hereknows. What doing is. “Rain sounds comforting,” you write. I’vedone my best to not call you every day, to pretendthat a phone isn’t a crustacean, that it isn’t the quickest pointbetween two means, to pretend the promises I made your sonaren’t the same as promises I made myself. We meanto harness no disguises, only locations. Only locations can reinterpretinvention as two film negatives lost in the trash, two locationsfinally established but in a crumbling, dropped lack of light.